Date: Thursday, May 2, 2013

Time: 2:30PM-3:30PM

Room: Washington Room 3

Description: The FCC’s new Healthcare Connect Fund offers important new opportunities for health care providers to obtain better broadband service at lower cost.  This new funding mechanism also provides significant benefits only to those health care providers that apply together as a consortium.  But what exactly is a consortium and how do you form one?  Hear from three successful FCC Rural Health Care pilot program networks about how they formed their consortia, the challenges they faced, and the benefits their members are now realizing.

Moderator: Jeffrey Mitchell, Counsel, Lukas Nace Gutierrez & Sachs, LLP

Panelists:

• Jim Rogers, ProInfoNet, New England Telehealth Consortium

• W. Roger Poston,II, Ed.D., COO, Medical University of South Carolina

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Poston received degrees from Mercer University, the Medical College of Georgia and West Virginia University.  He served as a tenured Associate Professor and Assistant Vice President for Information Technology at the University of Louisville and tenured Associate Professor and Director of Biomedical Communications at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.  Currently, he has a faculty appointment in the Department of Health Administration and Policy, College of Health Professions, and the Chief Operating Officer and Director for Academic and Research systems in the Office of the CIO at the Medical University of South Carolina. He served as the Telemedicine Focus Group Chair for the North Carolina Health Care Information and Computing Alliance for seven years and as the Director of Telehealth services at the North Carolina Baptist Hospitals, Inc.  He currently serves as the Executive Director for the South Carolina Light Rail and the Associate Program Director for the Palmetto State Providers Network, an RHC Pilot network.